Property Journal
Amy Ching-Yan Lam (2024)
‘Around this time last year, I had a birthday astrology reading where the reader said they could tell, just by looking at my chart, that I had run away from home when I was seventeen. They said that this year would be a revisiting of that event, but it would happen in a completely different way.’
From December 2021 to December 2022, artist and writer Amy Ching-Yan Lam kept a record of each time real estate, property or housing came up in conversation. She called this the Property Journal.
Over the course of a year, neighbourhood landmarks are demolished, politicians break promises, friends despair, and parents age. Mould appears to grow on Lam’s face moisturiser; as property organises people’s lives, it also overtakes them. What began as a simple framework soon becomes an index of precarity, told through the indignities, dread, and dreamscapes of what we’re able to call ‘home’.
Tender, fierce, and mordantly funny, Property Journal is a damning indictment of the permanent state of affairs known as the housing crisis.
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She is the author of the poetry collection, Baby Book (2023, Brick Books), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry, and Looty Goes to Heaven (2022, Eastside Projects). From 2006 to 2020 she was in the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, and was born in Hong Kong.
Property Journal is co-published with Richmond Art Gallery, Canada, with the support of Canada Council as part of our Co-Series, no. 25.
Pre-orders will be sent out in September 2024, and Property Journal will be published in November 2024.
